Class...shocking!

How interesting to see what happens when social class is raised in the battle for the General Election. Shocking! The most common view held by the media, the Conservative party and the LibDems is rather like the one in the clip below from David Cameron, that it's some how spiteful and petty. 'It's not where you are now that matters, but where you are going'.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/politics_show/8397729.stm

According to Marx and Engels the whole of history has been the history of class struggle, but according to those I've seen, heard and read talking about it in the media its really not relevant at all. Why would the media say that...?

Am I right in thinking that The Labour Party was created to represent the working class in Parliament? Some would say that Labour MPs were put there to 'fight the corner' for the working class as the Tories and the Liberals had other sections of societys' interests at heart.

One might be able to argue that the best class fighters in Parliament have always been the Tories and that despite their leader's rhetoric their levels of class consciousness have always been very high indeed. Discuss.

Cambridge

I'm back in Cambridge for the 5th Writers' Workshop that I run with with Professor Tony Booth from my university. We take 12 colleagues away to Cambridge to write. We talk together about each others work and spend hours in our rooms writing. A meal in the evening and then the pub in the centre of town to round the day off. It works every time - work for publication and great conversation.

Free Schools

As explained in the Observer (22.11.09) "Local authorities in England are no longer able to simply open a school, which they then run. Instead, following regulations that came into force in the summer of 2003, they have to put proposals out to tender..The Conservatives want to take things a step further by setting up a Swedish "free-school" system in which the government will fund schools to be run by charities or groups of parents"

Toby Young (pictured) wants to do this and send his children to his new school. In the same Observer article he writes: "We have no doubt that the school we want to set up will be popular with local parents. Its key differentiators will be rigorous setting, high academic expectations and an old fashioned system of pastoral care, with a uniform, houses, etc." In an earlier article (I think in the same paper) he argues that his school will be non-selective, but that children who do not behave will not be tolerated. All this raises some questions:

1. By allowing parents, charities and businesses, who can or want to, open schools, does this undermine the local authority which are under the control of elected local councillors? Does this undermine real local democracy and democratic influence on schools?

2. Toby Young wants his schools to be non-selective, but will his zero-tolerance rule mean that his school will become exclusive? Some children can not behave in the ways that Mr Young will want them to.

3. Will the charities be running the schools for children excluded from Mr Young's school and others like it? Can we expect the return of real Victorian values?

4. Will the 'Free School' break the social class segregation that currently is creeping more and more into our schools, or will it make it worse?

5. Is the Free School movement as advocated by the Tories part of a neo-liberal policy that Tony Blair and New Labour advanced?

Answers on a postcard